


The hexarch's advantage

by UrsulaKohl



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bodyswap, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28517454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrsulaKohl/pseuds/UrsulaKohl
Summary: Jedao Two wakes up in a new, tall, human body, one that likes laughing and breakfast. There's just one problem left to figure out.Diverges from canon afterRevenant Gun.
Relationships: Jedao Two/Vauhan Mikodez
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10
Collections: MachinExchange 2021





	The hexarch's advantage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sparcina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparcina/gifts).



Jedao woke up hungry. The good kind of hungry. He wouldn't mind crunchy potatoes and soft eggs wrapped in flatbread, right now, or more eggs, crispy at the edges and drizzled in hot sauce. He stretched, enjoying the possibilities, and his fingers brushed the wall behind his head.

That was strange. Jedao usually scrunched down near the foot of the bed. He stretched his feet instead, and found them poking into chilly air. The bed was shrinking. That couldn't be good. Jedao rolled onto the floor, bringing a blanket with him, sprang to his feet, and opened his eyes.

The room was dark. It was a soft, deep darkness, the kind Jedao remembered from his childhood on a sparsely settled planet, or from sneaking through storerooms as a cadet. It was a kind of darkness Jedao hadn't experienced since he woke up in the future. Since the hexarch Nirai Kujen gave him a new body, one that could stretch its senses out and feel the shape of every corner of the room.

Jedao reached mentally, and felt nothing. Reached again. The part of his mind that usually sensed the murmurs of passing moths was empty. Not even empty, blank. Like there was nothing there at all.

There was a rustle in the corner, a mundane throat-clearing. Jedao screamed and leapt toward the intruder.

"Lights on," said a voice, a little bored.

Jedao was stabbing his fingers at the intruder's eyes. He expected the counter. He didn't expect to overbalance and flop on his back, flat on the bed again. His center of balance didn't _work_ like that.

"Look at me," said the voice. It was familiar, though it didn't have the reverberation Jedao was used to.

Jedao propped himself on his elbows and looked. The intruder had his face, his mirror face, the one that had seen too many things and killed too many people he couldn't remember. 

"How many of us are there?" Jedao asked.

"One of you and one of me!" the intruder said cheerfully.

Jedao had thought being trapped inside the Citadel of Eyes was bad enough. "I'm not even on my own team?"

The intruder sighed. The sigh rippled through his body with a drama Jedao was certain he had never equalled. "I expected the attack, but I thought you'd be a little quicker on the uptake." His eyes unfocused briefly, like someone using an augment. (Jedao had never been permitted an augment.)

The ceiling above Jedao turned cloudy gray, then took on the sheen of a mirror. He saw someone tall, almost lanky, with smooth dark skin, an aquiline nose, and improbably long eyelashes. Someone identical to the hexarch Shuos Mikodez. Jedao snarled at the mirror. The hexarch's face snarled back at him.

The intruder laughed. "You're not going to say thank you? After I went to so much trouble to remove you from the body you keep trying to kill?"

"Thank you, Shuos-zho," Jedao said, holding absolutely still.

The hexarch sat on the bed beside him and patted the blanket. "Want to know how we did it?"

"You're going to tell me anyway, Shuos-zho." Mikodez could murder Jedao. Either directly, using his unfair confidence with Jedao's body, or by summoning assassins, or giving commands to the Citadel itself. But, in a trait clearly shared by all hexarchs, he wanted to monologue first. 

There was something almost soothing in the way the hexarch's confident voice came from Jedao's old lips. "Your friend was very clever. It took us a long time to realize there were gaps in the footage of your room at all, let alone that a servitor had created them. We had to set up a magnetic trap. But Hemiola was surprisingly helpful, once we established that we had goals in common."

"What are these goals, Shuos-zho?"

"To protect you, Garach Jedao Shkan."

Jedao laughed. He meant it to be a dry, sarcastic chuckle, but something about this body liked laughing. He found himself bubbling, shaking, all the way down to the tips of his fingers and his far-away toes.

The hexarch gripped his shoulder, casually. "You're a mutant ghost fox, but you're my mutant ghost fox. I look after _all_ the Shuos. You've been wasted, hiding away in this room."

Jedao settled into a calmer kind of stillness, weighted by the touch. "How did you change us? How many people did you have to murder, to get the right calendar?"

"Would you believe me if I said none at all?"

"I may be missing a lot of memories, but I am not a child."

"We did not kill any human beings." Mikodez's words were clipped, formal. He almost sounded the way a hexarch should. "Nor did we murder any moths. I realize I now have a special kinship with them. There was one servitor who had formed an unhealthy attachment to the shadow hexarch Nirai Kujen's notes. It did not survive the retrieval."

"But how did we trade?"

"It involved an absolutely vile emetic, and a lot of mirrors. You're lucky that the sedative took your memory of the climax. I woke up halfway through."

Jedao wanted to make a reassuring noise, or maybe a sophomoric joke. This made no sense. Monsters weren't reassuring. The hexarch couldn't like him, despite that rueful smile. "But, Shuos-zho, why did you want _my_ body?"

The hexarch set his hand against Jedao's cheek, turning his face until their gazes hooked and caught. "Because we are absolutely fucked, fox of mine. The servitors can dance around the Citadel and break every one of our codes. And some of them are allied with the moths."

"Shuos-zho, that doesn't explain—"

"I needed to speak to the moths directly. I admit I didn't trust you to translate." Mikodez's fingertips brushed Jedao's ear. He wanted to lean into the touch, to brush up against them as if he was his namesake the kitten. He was—

He was relaxing with the hexarch. The _second_ hexarch who had stolen his body. Absolutely fucked was right.

Mikodez leaned down and kissed him. Jedao was certain his lips had never been that firm, his tongue that sure. He made a noise in the back of his throat, between a plea and a song.

"Shall I apologize for my advantage, foxling?" asked the hexarch. "You see, I know how to please people shaped like me."

Jedao knew his old body well enough to catch the eyelash flicker, shutting tight against a memory, before the second kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for organizing, and for an inspirational combination of tags! I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Thanks also to Étienne for beta-reading! Any extraneous commas are my own responsibility.


End file.
